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From the Wikipedia:
Beowulf is an Old English heroic epic poem of unknown authorship, dating as recorded in the Nowell Codex manuscript from between the 8th and the early 11th century, set in Denmark and Sweden. Commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature, Beowulf has been the subject of much scholarly study, theory, speculation, discourse, and, at 3182 lines, has been noted for its length.
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From the Wikipedia:
My Man Jeeves is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the UK in May 1919 by George Newnes. Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, while the others concern Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Wooster.
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Bookstacks originally was for online reading, with most of the editions also in PDF and LIT format. After weighing many variables, it made sense to offer only PDFs. However, the way this site is set up now (on a WordPress blog), it’s just as simple to include any number of formats in the same post as it is to offer only one.
The first alternate format edition is the HTML version of Plato’s Apology. It might be of special interest to eBook developers who are looking for clean, well-formatted source code.
My view of this site has always been threefold:
- To provide material as enjoyable to read as a paper edition.
- To raise the standard for free eBooks, which has never been high enough.
- To “seed” the eBook community with proper source materials for further refinement and for use in different formats.
I hope this absolute reliance on quality over quantity will inspire other people to put their best into their work.
From the Wikipedia:
(The) Apology (of Socrates) is Plato’s version of the speech given by Socrates as he defends himself against the charges of being a man “who corrupted the young, refused to worship the gods, and created new deities”. “Apology” here has its earlier meaning (now usually expressed by the word “apologia”) of speaking in defense of a cause or of one’s beliefs or actions (from the Greek απολογία).
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Click here to download as a single HTML file (30 KB). (File is in ZIP format.)
From Wikipedia:
The Man With Two Left Feet, and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on March 8, 1917 by Methuen & Co., London, and in the United States in 1933 by A.L. Burt and Co., New York. Most of the stories had previously appeared in periodicals, generally the Strand in the UK and the Saturday Evening Post in the U.S.
It is a fairly miscellaneous collection – most of the stories concern relationships, sports and household pets, and do not feature any of Wodehouse’s regular characters; one however, “Extricating Young Gussie”, is remarkable as the first appearance of some of Wodehouse’s most well-known and beloved characters, Jeeves and his master Bertie Wooster (Although Bertie’s surname isn’t given and Jeeves’ role is very small), along with Bertie’s fearsome Aunt Agatha.
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The Man With Two Left Feet at Project Gutenberg.
Tales of Terror and Mystery is a collection of short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, two of which feature anonymous “cameos” by Sherlock Holmes. A good source for lesser-known material by Conan Doyle.
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Tales of Terror and Mystery at Project Gutenberg.
From Wikipedia:
A Study in Scarlet is a detective mystery novel written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which was first published in 1887. It is the first story to feature the character of Sherlock Holmes, who would later become one of the most famous and iconic literary detective characters, with long-lasting interest and appeal. The book’s title derives from a speech given by Holmes to his companion Doctor Watson on the nature of his work, in which he describes the story’s murder investigation as his “study in scarlet”: “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
Conan Doyle wrote the novel at the age of 27. As a general practice doctor in Southsea, England, he had already published short stories in several magazines of the day, such as the periodical London Society. The story was originally titled A Tangled Skein, and was eventually published by Ward Lock & Co. in Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887, after many rejections. The author received £25 in return for the full rights (although Conan Doyle had pressed for a royalty instead). It was illustrated by D. H. Friston. The novel was first published as a book on July 1888 by Ward, Lock & Co., and featured drawings by the author’s father, Charles Doyle. A second edition appeared the following year and was illustrated by George Hutchinson; a year later in 1890, J. B. Lippincott & Co. released the first American version. Numerous further editions, translations and dramatisations have appeared since.
The story, and its main character, attracted little public interest when it first appeared. Only eleven complete copies of Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887 are known to exist now and they have considerable value. Although Conan Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, A Study in Scarlet is one of only four full-length novels in the original canon. The novel was followed by The Sign of Four, published in 1890.
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A Study in Scarlet at Project Gutenberg.
From Wikipedia:
Dead Souls (Russian: Мёртвые души) by Nikolai Gogol, Ukrainian-born Russian writer, was first published in 1842, and is one of the most prominent works of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an “epic poem in prose”, and within the book as a “novel in verse”. Despite supposedly completing the trilogy’s second part, Gogol destroyed it shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence (like Sterne’s Sentimental Journey), it is usually regarded as complete in the extant form.
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Dead Souls at Project Gutenberg.
- Machiavelli’s The Prince. You would think it’s an easy book to do, as it’s so short, but there are a grunch of footnotes, and the source TXT is a bit of a bear to work with. What’s done (about 75%) looks beautiful, though.
- Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Really a very entertaining book. Occasionally racist and sexist, although in an almost laughable way (I mean, really … the size and shape of a person’s skull is so 19th c. it’s not even funny.) (Or, rather, it is.)
- Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There are no great source TXTs from Gutenberg for me to work with. There is one that is actually formatted in TeX, and then was even converted to PDF, so one would assume this effort is pointless. (Until one opens the PDF in question, and sees how unreadable it is.)
- Shakespeare’s Hamlet (in Portuguese). I get most of my hits from a Portuguese site, so in honor of lendo.org, I thought I would find a good book in the native tongue and put it up on the site. It won’t be proofread, as my Portuguese is worse than my Mandarin (meaning I don’t speak a word of it). The main reason I’m doing Hamlet in English is so that I can use it as a cross-reference to make sure the Portuguese version is (somewhat) correct.
- Gogol’s Dead Souls. One of the easier ones to do, despite the footnotes. There is always the danger, in converting from one format to another, that I’ll mess a few things up, like some curly quotes, etc. … but it looks pretty good, from what I can tell; and it was proofread when I first put it up many years ago.
- Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I know. I’ve got to be nuts to even attempt this; although I did manage to get War and Peace up on an earlier incarnation of the site. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to do this. The footnotes were the real deal-breaker at the time. Doing footnotes in HTML is very tiring. Doing them in LaTeX, by comparison, is so simple that one is almost encouraged to tackle a text that’s full of them. I’m using two complete HTML copies of the book (from Gutenberg) as the source. The main text, in ISO 8859-1 encoding; and the footnotes, in ASCII. I figure, with that wealth of 8-bit text, that any of the 7-bit text (in the footnotes) that needs a diacritical mark (etc.) will be an obvious fix. There will probably be more on this later.
- Balzac’s Letters of Two Brides. This is the next book in the Human Comedy, and as the first two were just fantastic, I really look forward to doing more of them.
From Wikipedia:
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine. Wilde later revised this edition, making several alterations, and adding new chapters; the amended version was published by Ward, Lock, and Company in April 1891. The story is often mis-titled The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
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Picture of Dorian Gray at Project Gutenberg.
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